Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Orionid Meteors

The Earth crosses the dust of Halley’s Comet twice each year -- the next instance being tomorrow morning. The Comet itself won't be on display again until 2061, but early tomorrow one will be able to see the Orionid Meteor Shower, caused by Halley. When a comet's dust particles collide with the Earth’s upper atmosphere at nearly 150,000 mph, it incinerates in a brief, brilliant flash of light -- a meteor.

In 1909 Mark Twain -- who was born two weeks after Halley's passed closest to Earth -- said: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"

The prediction was accurate: Twain died one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth in 1910.

Who I Am

Name: Sean /
Nationality: U.S.A. /
Creed: Catholic /
Philosophy: Gnomish wisdom for the most part; to the extent I’ve made a formal assessment, moderate realism /
Passions: Faith, family, country; Irish and English folk music; reading and literature; Tolkien trivia; travel /
Zodiac: Aries, Monkey, Gen-X /
Maps are tools for making sense of the world as it presents itself to the senses.
Keys give passage to the realm of knowledge and substance: they allow the mind to apprehend the workings behind what the senses detect.
Clocks, calendars, and the like point the way to time, numbers, infinity, universals, eternity, the absolute, the immeasurable, the never-ending. All three are products of minds capable of thought, memory, and imagination.
From sense to substance to permanence: because not everything is relative.